


Those Who Fight Monsters

by Gray_Days



Series: Children of Pallas [6]
Category: DCU, Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths
Genre: Asante Edward Nigma, Canonical Character Death, Case Fic, Detective Edward Nigma, Earth-3, Gen, Jekyll vs. Hyde, Mirror Universe, Owlman is a monster, Starring John Mulaney, They Fight Crime!, Trans Characters, magic is a crapshoot, obsessive worldbuilding for one-off details, odd couple, spoilers redacted from tags
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-01-16 00:33:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18510310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gray_Days/pseuds/Gray_Days
Summary: Beautiful, I watch you tryto see yourself through others’ eyes.But mirrors are a losing game —they only show you backwards anyway.The magic and the miserycome and go so easily.(And when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.)Usually, when Cypher goes up against Owlman, it's about puncturing the man's mystique — showing everyone what he really is, how fear turns a petty mobster into something untouchable and unstoppable. It's not about risking his life to steal back stolen mystical artifacts, rescuing runaway child assassins, or outsmarting an unknown enemy who seems to know Cypher better than he knows himself.





	Those Who Fight Monsters

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> John Mulaney does not physically appear in this fic, but [he is here in spirit](https://feynites.tumblr.com/post/174487847274/only-ten-percent-clever-arkhamkjay).
> 
> DC’s official canonical position is that All Religions Are True, which has some interesting implications for applied ritual magic. Don’t mess with stolen Aztec artifacts, kids.
> 
> For some reason, I find the [Ojibwe double-vowel orthography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ojibwe_writing_systems#Romanized_Ojibwe_systems) in common present-day use literally almost _impossible_ to read despite my existing familiarity with non-Latin alphabets and lack of relevant learning disabilities — my brain constantly stumbles at the long vowels, and I inevitably get lost mid-word. Therefore, for both my own sake and that of readers who do not necessarily have those linguistic advantages, I use a less-common version of the same spelling that indicates long vowels with macrons (ˉ) rather than double vowels. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to find English-language resources which use transliteration styles that I find more readable.
> 
> (I researched everything here as much as I could without dragging my writing to a complete halt, but if I got anything major wrong that doesn’t fall under the purview of an alternate/mirror universe, please let me know.)

_You would think,_ thought Edward Nigma, crouching behind the wall of shipping containers he’d scaled partway up for a better vantage point, _that criminals would find somewhere else to conduct their business._

He supposed he couldn’t fault them for a terminal incapacity to learn from experience. Stupidity, after all, was rarely the fault of the person suffering from it — rather, the blame lay with those more capable of complex thought who refused to either apply that capability or encourage their fellows to do so. To wit: to nitpick the witless while those _with_ wit stood witness was gravely iniquitous.

In other words, Ed understood the logistical convenience of Gotham’s wharf district as a transportation hub for trafficked goods. It was just that _successfully_ trafficking goods to and from a stationary location at frequent intervals relied more upon the willful failure of local law enforcement to enforce said laws than it did on foresight, and anyone who hated Cypher as much as the Owl and his pet mafia should really have figured out by now that not everyone could be tortured or bribed into compliance.

Disrupting the Court of Owls’ business was a paltry victory in the face of _wanton murder and corruption,_ but it was the little things that counted.

Cables creaked as a second crate was lowered to the dock beside the first. In the dim light cast over the boat’s deck and glinting off the waves below, the crates looked about a meter high and made of some sort of dark plastic or carbon composite, more like military transport containers than the nondescript cargo that disguised more run-of-the-mill contraband. The captain of the sleek little cigarette boat, a hefty woman in Pueblo garb who stood head and shoulders above her four visible crew members, was directing the unloading in a low voice calculated to carry just to the edges of the small radius of activity around her.

As Ed watched, a shadow passed over the matte-black side of the boat near where the mooring ropes were tied off; a moment later, the captain’s voice cut off abruptly and she tensed, looking over her shoulder. An icy jolt of remembered fear buried itself between Ed’s shoulder blades and wrapped tight around his ribs as he recognised the colourless half-circle of face that emerged from the darkness a few feet behind her. 

The Owl.

(Edward refused to dignify him with the title of _king,_ much less the whispered epithet he’d laid claim to as smugly as everything else he stole from Gotham’s streets, where the cowardly and superstitious swore that anyone who came and went as mysteriously as the death-shadow that threatened them must be paranormal, more than human, an invincible monster like the Superwoman who couldn’t be harmed by mere fists or bullets. The United Nations of America were a _republic:_ power should be subject to the people, not the other way around, and the only power a court was _supposed_ to have was that of dispensing justice.)

Ed pulled a pair of night-vision goggles from the inner front pocket of his coat, unfolded them from their wallet-sized storage profile with a single complicated movement that made them flower out into shape like a tesseract, and tightened the strap snugly around his head. Making sure that his shadow didn’t extend beyond the darkness draping his form, Edward leaned forward around the corner of the shipping container to adjust the focus. At 6x magnification, all he could tell was that the captain was speaking in a halting mix of English and something else he didn’t know well enough to identify by sight. How unhelpful.

Despite the poor angle, he managed to catch the words _temple_ and _Mexica._ Across from her, a pair of thin, frowning lips responded _that you were promised…once I’ve verified the…_ in a similar blend of languages before a chance change in posture blocked the Owl’s face from view.

Ed palmed his PDA, flipping it open without looking down, brushing his thumb over the keyboard to hit number six on his speed-dial by feel. Killer Croc liked to patrol Gotham’s undercity and riverfront when she didn’t have pressing business elsewhere; if there was anyone Ed could rely on to arrive promptly, it was her.

Meanwhile, however…

The Owl had apparently finished his conversation with the smuggler captain, and now flowed over the boat’s railing and down the winch cable to land noiselessly on the dock beside his ill-gotten cargo. The Fantastic Phantasma (Edward granted her the title grudgingly, since she really _was_ that good of a magician) stepped out of the circle of henchmen with her trademark aplomb to join him at his left hand, the blood red of her top-hat-and-tails ensemble catching and refracting the light as if jeweled. With a flourish of her hand and a haughty command of _“Nepo!”_ the lid of the first crate flung itself open like it was eager to get away from her.

(Ed _wanted_ to consider real magic a form of cheating. But the practice required a fundamental willingness to reject reality that he’d never gotten the hang of — after a lifetime working to delineate the truth in precise terms, it felt too much like a betrayal to throw that all away on a whim in favour of making up arbitrary rules. Klarion was fond enough of Edward’s diablerie that xe had tried to teach him a few things, but all Ed ever really managed was parlour tricks like snuffing out candles or making cards vanish into thin air, which were almost easier to do without using any magic at all.)

Nestled in a dark bed of die-cut foam was a tecuhtli’s ransom in ancient Mesoamerican art, gleaming with the rich brassy shine of old, pure gold and silver or the varicoloured glimmer of precious and semiprecious gems, in every form from jewellery and statuettes to knapped-stone blades and what appeared to be religious regalia. Phantasma ghosted the tips of her fingers over them, barely touching, then stepped back again and ordered, _“Laever ruoy eurt erutan!”_

A blinding flash of light the sunset-red of the inside of one’s eyelids. Ed flinched back and pushed the goggles up onto his forehead to rub at his watering eyes, cursing the loss of his night vision. An irrepressible part of his brain was already at work translating the unfamiliar syllables of Phantasma’s inverted incantation into intelligible form: _reveal your true nature._

When the purple-black afterimages dancing before him finally parted, it was to reveal Phantasma lifting something flat and round out of the box with a soft, uncharacteristic reverence. The bright geometric patterns on its surface caught and held the light of the half-moon overhead like a mirror, illuminating the slow curve of Phantasma’s lips into a hungry grin. “It’s the real deal,” she breathed.

In Edward’s hand, the barely-audible ringing from his PDA’s speaker clicked over to a voicemail tone followed by a curt “Leave a message” in that familiar gruff bass. Croc must have left any electronic means of contact behind to avoid destroying it via submersion, a regular hazard for her. It seemed Ed was without backup for the nonce.

Drat and blast. Cypher was in no way prepared to take on both Owlman _and_ one of his made men simultaneously, much less the miscellaneous muscle surrounding them, but the need for intervention had become urgent if Ed was to prevent potential catastrophe. He didn’t have enough information yet to guess _what_ that catastrophe might be, but anything that made one of the most talented and ruthless strigae on the continent that happy was a full-page spread worth of bad news.

He would have to improvise.

Edward pulled out one of a dozen or so miniature radio transmitters he kept on his person, murmured into it for a moment, peeled off the backing, and leaned around the corner to affix it to the side of the shipping container by means of a quick-setting putty courtesy of LexCorp’s corps of chemical engineers. He then clambered silently to the end of the wall of shipping containers, where a crane stood towering over the dock. Ed slipped into the operator’s seat and quickly found the starter: a key-card slot at the far right of the control panel. Thirty seconds later, he’d levered the control panel’s cover off and stripped the relevant wires to reveal the live ends. Just before he connected them, he opened an interface on his PDA and hit play.

Halfway across the dock, amplified to around 50 decibels, his own voice called out, “A conundrum for you.”

The Owl’s head whipped around at the sound, followed a fraction of a second later by those of his cronies. Edward twisted the wires together and allowed the sounds of the water and creaking cables to cover those of the crane starting up.

“Get him,” the Owl snapped, lips already curling away from his teeth in a nascent snarl of fury.

An assortment of pistols and at least two (definitely not street-legal, for what little that was worth in Gotham) automatic rifles were pulled to strafe the general area where the sound seemed to originate. Under the deafening ricochet of bullets, Cypher’s voice continued unruffled, “What is a writer’s greatest friend and a fish’s greatest foe?”

Edward had never operated a crane personally, but he had of course studied schematics, and the controls were easy enough to get a hang of as he worked out how to lower and rotate the crane arm. As the shots began to slow and grow less certain, Ed leaned his head out of the cab and shouted, “A _hook!”_ at the same time he slammed the pulley release and jerked the arm-rotation lever forward to full speed.

Just as he’d intended, Phantasma whirled in his direction and opened her mouth just in time to catch the twenty-kilo crane hook in the chest, knocking the artifact out of her loosened grip and sweeping her off the dock and into the water. Ed hoped the artifact, whatever it was, hadn’t been damaged, but that was a secondary concern as the guns swung toward him and he hastily quit the operator’s seat before a hail of shots smashed through the front window and into the body of the crane. The Owl, it seemed from a very quick glance, had tired of relying on the questionable competence of his lackeys and pulled his own sidearm, aiming with care rather than firing indiscriminately like the rest. On an instinct far too deep to be the product of his conscious awareness, Ed ducked just in time to feel a freezing-hot burst of pain graze his scalp and threw himself behind one of the armoured vans the miscreants had driven here.

All right. This engagement wasn’t going quite as well as Ed would have liked so far, but considering the numbers, he was doing significantly better than he could be.

Time to even the odds.

Ed sent out a GPS-tagged all-points bulletin to his emergency-contact list, then flipped his PDA shut again and squeezed his eyes closed as he rolled a smoke bomb and flashbang out from under the van at the same time. The surrounding scenery blazed in black-and-white relief for an instant before the bulk of the gunfire was replaced with cries of confusion and alarm. One gunshot was followed by a sharp scream, then a growled _“Hold your fire,_ you idiots!” from the Owl.

Ed had already switched his goggles to thermal-imaging mode and slipped around the side of the van, allowing the billowing smoke and the deep violet of his suit to cloak him in the shifting shadows. He caught the first henchperson by surprise, hooking the assault rifle in their hands with the crook of his cane and wrenching it spinning away into the darkness before incapacitating them with a quick succession of blows to the crotch and temple. The cries of alarm grew louder and more disarrayed as Edward ducked under the next goon’s gunshots and dropped them with a tap to that reliable knock-out button at the corner of the jaw. There was enough time at this point to pull out another flashbang and a chaff grenade simply to add to the confusion and foil any attempts at picking Ed out of the chaos via infrared or sonar. He’d faced the Owl enough by now to know his methods; eye for eye, this at least put them on equal ground.

From one perspective, anyway. From another, it could be argued that ten-to-one odds meant only _one_ of the two of them had to worry about friendly fire.

Ed made it to the row of crates by memory. There was the sound of splashing nearby, and a frantic gasp for breath, followed by coughing as Phantasma tried to inflate her lungs after that impact to the solar plexus; Ed rolled a concussion grenade in that direction to ensure that she wouldn’t be able to get a word out and dove around the nearest crate for cover before it went off with a ribcage-rattling bass _thump._

Crouched down near the ground, where the smoke was least dense, he could just see the moon-gleam of the artifact where it had fallen back onto the foam padding of the open crate. Ed would have liked to swipe all the smuggled goods out from under the Owl’s beak, but there was no way he’d be able to get even one of the crates out of here without getting killed in the process, and whether or not there were other dangerous items among them, there was only one that Ed knew for sure could not be allowed to remain in his enemies’ possession. How did the expression go — _One who fights and steals away may live to fight another day; but he who dares to overreach must take cold comfort in defeat?_

Edward lunged for the artifact, got his fingers around its edges as he effected a ten-cent reversal, and immediately stumbled as it landed hard against the dock with a _crack_ that thankfully didn’t seem to manifest any visible damage. It was far heavier than he’d expected — half a meter wide and at least four centimeters thick, carved from some dense stone. For a terrifying moment Ed had to stop to rearrange the artifact under one arm so as to keep at least one hand free; somehow he maintained a clear enough head to manage it within a few seconds, then took off running.

He made it about two meters before something jerked back _hard_ on his collar and he gagged, nearly losing his footing at the sudden redirection of his center of gravity. Ed swung his cane blindly behind him; felt the culprit catch it; experienced a small panic attack as he gave the cane up for lost and released it to plunge his hand into one of his many concealed pockets.

His assailant — it had to be the Owl, of course — spun him around just as Ed pulled out the remainder of his flashbangs in a single handful and flung them in the brute’s face. The result was akin to standing at ground zero of a lightning strike. Ed thought he heard a shout, strangely muffled in the ringing aftermath of the blast; the Owl staggered back, shielding his face with one hand, but the iron grip on Ed’s collar held fast and Ed was perforce dragged with him. Ed took advantage of the moment of disorientation to conjure another of his gadgets, this one more traditional: a palm-sized can of pepper spray mixed with fluorescent purple (and expressly body-safe) paint. This time the Owl managed to turn his head away fast enough to avoid being blinded or inhaling the aerosol directly, and before Ed had time for another thought his own cane cracked against his cheek so hard he might have blacked out for the briefest instant. He certainly almost dropped the artifact, apparently only keeping ahold of it through sheer primal obstinacy. His uncoordinated attempt to bring the pepper spray to bear a second time ended with it getting knocked out of his hand with a numbing blow to the inside of his wrist followed in fluid near-synchrony by a knee to the gut that drove all the remaining breath out of Ed’s body. He crumpled like a day-old newspaper.

The Owl threw the cane to one side contemptuously, twisting the collar of Edward’s shirt to strangle him with it as he wrapped a taloned gauntlet around the edge of the stone disc in Ed’s grasp. “I’ll be taking back what’s mine now,” he said in a whisper like steel through silk, the featureless lenses of his mask catching and holding Ed’s gaze through the wavering darkness with the unblinking ember stare of a child’s storybook monster.

Ed’s mouth tasted like blood; he could feel it dripping over the curve of his lip, and he gathered it in his mouth to spit in the Owl’s face. Might as well, after all, whatever happened next.

Some of his blood dripped onto the stone, and that’s when everything exploded.

* * *

Edward coughed as the smoke began to clear, lifting his head from the aged, water-warped boards beneath his cheek so he could rub at his bruised throat. Around him, everyone else seemed to be in a similar state, groaning or clutching their heads as they regained their bearings; somewhere nearby, a fading patter of footsteps beat a rapid retreat as one of the Owl’s hirelings apparently decided that desertion was the better part of valour. This seemed an eminently practical idea. Ed pushed himself up to his hands and knees, scanning the surrounding area in search of the fallen artifact — then froze as his eyes met the wide, gleaming lenses of a mask.

Time stopped for that single breathless moment, suspended in the kind of clear, cold expectation of a water droplet gathering at the tip of an icicle, waiting for gravity to take hold.

Then, a sound — too quick and too soft for Ed to identify before the mask’s owner broke their locked gazes to dart away from the talons flashing through the space his head had just occupied. The claws caught on the upswept edge of the mask as he moved, ripping it free and slamming it into the dock with a splintering of wood. Something at the base of Ed’s spine propelled him without the need for thought and he somehow rolled to his feet and drew what he’d fondly termed his Glue Gun in a single movement, cementing the Owl’s hand and lower arm to the boards with a glob of sticky white webbing and halting his pursuit with an abrupt jerk. For a long millisecond, Edward found himself staring across the gangster’s bulk into a pair of wide, dark eyes set in the pale face of an adolescent child.

A feral snarl tore itself free of the Owl’s throat, and those eyes flickered downward in time for the child’s frozen form to blur into motion, feathered cloak flaring around his narrow shoulders like open wings as metal clashed in the air between child and Owl and ricocheted off in a random direction. The sound of a blade embedding itself in one of the shipping containers somewhere behind Edward’s head was overtaken by the rending echo of a gunshot, then a second and third as the kid dodged aside, a thin line of blood opening up along his cheek.

“Hey, birdbrain!” Ed yelled, ignoring the giddy flutter of terror clawing its way up from his stomach into his esophagus. The Owl’s attention snapped in his direction — only to earn him a point-blank spatter of white goo between the eyes.

The Owl _hissed,_ a rising, uncanny sound like the static screech of a barn owl, increasing to a deep growling scream of thwarted fury as his instinctive attempt to clear his vision succeeded only in trapping his other hand in the hardening webbing as well. Before he could think better of it, Ed sprinted the few steps between them to plant his foot against the Owl’s shoulder and vault over to his other side. “Let’s _vamoose,_ kid!” he shouted as he grabbed the child’s arm (think about how it tensed under his grip _later)_ and pulled him along into the maze of shipping crates, scattering a line of smoke bombs, chaff grenades, and canisters of one of Strawman’s more _interestingly_ incapacitating formulas behind them to cover their retreat. “Looks like _someone’s_ gotten into a sticky situation!” Ed called back as he ran, stifling the hysterical giggles that threatened to bubble up into his voice.

After a minute or so of putting as much distance as possible between them and the waterfront, Edward slowed, both to avoid giving away their position and because the pain in his throat was starting to sharpen and pulse up through his temples with every harsh breath. He was surprised to find each time he looked back that the child whom the Owl had attempted to inhume was still with him instead of having peeled away during their flight, a shadow in Edward’s peripheral blind spot whose dappled grey cloak and dark clothing hid him so efficiently that it took Ed a moment to spot that pale face floating through the gloom whenever he turned his head. The kid caught him looking, and gestured (in exaggerated motions so as to be visible), _Sign?_

Rather than roll his eyes, Ed merely signed back, _Obviously._

A quick, restrained nod. _Owlman knows everywhere I can go. I need shelter from you._

Which explained that. Edward hesitated, to his private discomfort at the moral implications thereof — but on the admittedly fallible logic that he was still alive, and that none of the events of the past few minutes seemed to have been planned judging by the evident discomfiture of everyone involved, he gave the kid an encouraging smile and an _A-OK_ signal. The kid’s eyes narrowed, but he acknowledged the response with another curt nod.

Keeping his hand in his pocket to avoid giving the two of them away by the dim backlight of the screen — and doing his best to control the spike in his cortisol level when the kid fell a wary step back at the motion — Ed opened his PDA and touch-typed an abbreviated message: _Owl & Phant. + herd @ pier 13. Gas mask zone. Lying low._ Cypher’s safehouses were secure inside and out; if he was falling for an obvious ruse, he could at least contain the fallout by limiting contact with his colleagues.

Ed shut the PDA again, automatically catching the flip-screen with the pad of his thumb and easing it the remaining few millimeters to forestall an otherwise audible click, then turned his attention back to their surroundings and the puzzle at hand. Where best to hide from an owl?

In the daylight, traditionally speaking. (As usual, tradition was mistaken — most owls could see just as well in bright light as their diurnal counterparts.) If that couldn’t be accomplished, then ideally out of hearing range if not outside its territory entirely. Otherwise? Owls were mighty hunters, but in the contest between flying and fleeing, the hunt inevitably ended at the entrance to the quarry’s burrow.

As a metaphor it was frustratingly inexact, but at least it provided a _direction._

Edward bent to set a single ball bearing on the ground in front of him. It rolled diagonally off to his left, toward the wall of shipping crates lining the narrow lane they were traversing, and Ed snatched it up again before it could collide with the steel siding. _Look for a drain or manhole,_ he signed, then at his young shadow’s nod moved as swiftly as he dared along the line of crates until he reached a gap he could sidle through. He tested the grade again on the other side — a little farther to the left, this time — and followed it ever so gradually down, stopping to check now and again until at the third row they crossed he saw a dip in the ground and hastened toward it, half-fledged foundling fluttering silently in his wake.

The sewer grate was iron, rust-stained, and bolted down. Edward grimaced, then turned to the child behind him and signed with an inquisitive tilt of the head, _Keep a lookout?_

The kid leapt up the ladder built into the side of the nearest shipping container and scaled it like a squirrel without question or hesitation. Edward knelt and got to work with a handheld cutting torch, crouching over it with his coat spread, cape-like, to keep the light from showing more than necessary. It took a few seconds to decapitate the four bolts holding the grate in place; a little longer for them to cool down enough that he felt safe picking up the severed boltheads in gloved fingers and setting them aside. “Come on,” he whispered in the general direction he’d seen the kid last.

There was no apparent response. Ed squinted, searching the stygian stillness for any sign of his stray night-errant, and was beginning to contemplate alternative options for drawing the kid’s attention without landing one or both of them on the pages of the _Gotham Gazette’_ s grisly-obituary section when said owlet’s sudden appearance at his elbow nearly sent him into cardiac arrest. Ed clutched his chest and blew out a long, thin, soundless breath through his teeth, willing his heart to slow and preferably cease its attempts to escape via his throat. Thirty-six years old and he’d already been doing this far too long. The child beside him merely waited, watching, apparently unaffected.

When Edward felt less like he was about to immediately drop dead, he gestured the kid in ahead of him. He was subjected to a flat, suspicious glance for a moment; then the kid obeyed, disappearing into the hole. Ed took advantage of the few seconds of waiting to stretch a pair of forensic plastic covers over his shoes and then dropped down after, landing with a faint _thlap_ on the mud-slimed brick below.

According to city regulations, Gotham’s main sewers were typically built to a height of 2.1 meters, low enough to be claustrophobic for those susceptible to such things, but designed primarily with an eye toward safety in case workers encountered unexpected hazards that might necessitate an expedient escape. It therefore wasn’t too great a stretch for Ed to spend the next thirty seconds rigging a concussion grenade to the ceiling just out of view from above, set go off if the grate was raised more than a few millimeters from its frame before the next rainfall soaked through the grenade's loosened casing. Residual heat would leave their pursuers a _literal_ glowing red sign if any of them thought to track their prey in the low-infrared range, which the Owl certainly would once he managed to free himself; even if it wasn’t enough to take him out of the immediate picture, the explosion would provide ample warning to Edward and his companion of the imminent danger. In the meantime, the layer of earth between them would at least block any clear evidence of a trail.

That precaution taken, Ed flipped a thumb-sized penlight into his hand and on to its lowest setting in what he normally accomplished as a single smooth flourish but almost fumbled this time out of sheer nerves. A dim red glow lit the tunnel ahead of them just brightly enough to delineate the edges of the raised walkways along either wall and cast shadows where erosion and debris left uneven spots on the floor. Edward didn’t need it — the human body produced enough infrared radiation that his goggles could handle even the near-complete darkness underground — but nocturnal theming aside, the kid standing beside him still needed _some_ illumination to guide his path. Ed held out the penlight and gestured for him to take it.

(Ed shouldn’t make assumptions, he supposed; he’d defaulted to thinking in masculine pronouns while still under the misconception that he was looking at the Owl, but there was no real indication of gender either way unless one chose to read short hair as male, which had far too wide a range of exceptions to make a rule. _Them,_ then.)

There was the barest pause while his fellow fugitive’s gaze flicked from the drain overhead to deeper into the tunnel before a small gloved hand plucked the light out of Ed’s grasp too quickly to track and the kid tipped their head in an obvious signal to lead the way. Ed complied with alacrity — enthusiasm, even.

He would have been less enthusiastic if it had rained recently. Even after the city began overhauling its sanitation infrastructure in the fifties and sixties to belatedly accommodate a population that had expanded exponentially over the previous century, this part of town had been allowed to retain its original combination storm-and-dung sewer system to account for the inevitable degree of industrial runoff and less pleasant contaminants in the wastewater, which meant that the sewer tunnels _stank_ at the best of times and were only really walkable during dry stretches or right after a storm had passed through and scoured them relatively clean. Edward had spent several happy years exploring the many-layered hive of tunnels below Gotham’s streets during some of the worst periods of his life (and nearly gotten himself killed once or twice in the process) and yet he’d _still_ had a hard time steeling himself to map out the Oldtown sewers except through a sense of bloody-minded archival duty.

(And at least _then_ he’d worn appropriate gear, not a linen suit and jika-tabi.)

That map hovered invisibly behind his eyes as he counted steps and turns. Edward changed course seemingly at random, always circling ultimately away from the wharf, confounding their trail; after the third or fourth side tunnel they passed, he made a short detour in the wrong direction to hide another speaker in a cleft in the wall where a couple of bricks had eroded away, then hastened past another few intersections before turning it on. Off in the distance behind them, a set of cautious footsteps echoed directionlessly.

There was a quiet huff of air behind him. Edward turned quickly, but nothing appeared out of place — only the child following ghostlike in his footsteps, still (as always) eerily expressionless. He moved faster, feeling the primeval spectre of the wolf hovering at his back, claws and teeth bared.

_What follows you night and day, and only gets closer the further you run away? Death._

Not helping.

_The more there is of me, the less you see. What am I?_

Edward took a half-dollar piece from his pocket and walked it across his knuckles to calm down, flicking it from hand to hand after each iteration. He couldn’t multiply exponents while he was busy tracking distance down here, but at least—

The coin slipped between his fingers and landed on the tunnel floor with a high, terrible ringing.

Edward stopped dead. His mind went blank with panic for a moment; then he flattened himself against the wall, heedless of the filth as he switched his goggles to thermal imaging to scan the sewers in every direction. His diminutive shadow had vanished around the nearest corner as soon as the silence was broken. Ed held his breath, straining his hearing for any sound other than the thin echoing trickles and drips of sewage.

_What is everywhere, except where something is?_

_Nothing._

Not that that was reassuring when it came to the Owl. Ed’s fingers sought out a loose fragment of brick in the wall behind him and wiggled it loose; he exhaled carefully, then tossed it back along the tunnel where the last junction split off. He stole around the same corner the kid had taken as the brick fragment clattered against the floor in the distance, snatching up the coin without a moment’s pause as he went.

Now, how to — ah.

With his clean hand, Edward opened his PDA just enough for the light to outline the lapel of his jacket. Sure enough, a molten silhouette slipped out from behind a support column and back to his side a moment later. There was something in the arch of the kid’s eyebrows when Ed switched back to near-infrared that felt like reproach. Edward lengthened his stride, accelerating, turning the soiled glove inside out around the coin and slipping both into a plastic evidence bag in his pocket as he walked.

Over five minutes and no eardrum-shattering kaboom. Had the Owl lost their trail? Or had he simply figured out a way to bypass Edward’s _bubo_ trap?

Another nerve-wracking kilometer and a half as the bat flies, every sense heightened to adrenaline keenness for any hint of danger. Finally Ed held up a hand as he paused beneath the anemic light of a storm drain not far from Wāwiyebī'igan Mīkana, the dividing lane between the edge of the riverside shantytown Gotham had once been and the metropolis it became, where the old sewer system ended. In a city as old and populous as Gotham, there were always people greedy or desperate enough to go to absurd lengths to hide from the prying eyes of the law; consequently, the soil beneath it positively teemed with a termite warren of illicit tunnels, hidden basements, and body dumps that remained unmapped for generations except by the occasional unsuspecting inheritor or intrepid explorer, particularly those that utilised sonar technology. Edward waved his PDA slowly over the northwest wall of the sewer like a blindfolded man navigating a china shop, watching the dim monochrome interpolation on the screen for a change in depth.

And — there. _Eureka._

Ed stowed the PDA back in its pocket and everted his muck-stained glove back onto his right hand so he could run his hands over the bricks. After a few seconds, his fingers caught on a space where the mortar had seemingly eroded away; another where a brick had chipped diagonally. He twisted to pull on the former at the same time as he shoved his weight against the latter, and was rewarded with a faint scraping as a perfectly-balanced set of floodgates opened halfway up the wall next to him.

With a punch-drunk grin and a thespian flourish, he gestured his young companion inside.

The kid didn’t even hesitate by now, and merely slipped into the tunnel beyond with nary a sound. Ed stopped a meter inside the floodgates to remove his gloves and pull another brick out and downward. The gates swung shut behind him, occluding their trail as efficiently as if it had just gone up in smoke.

This tunnel was much smaller than the main sewers, only about a meter and a half in each direction, but it was at least clean enough to creep along on his hands and the balls of his feet. Ed maneuvered around his companion to take the lead again, doing his best to keep from crowding the kid or making unnecessary contact. “Stay right behind me,” he whispered — not that he was too worried about his tagalong suddenly changing their modus operandi and going astray, but because whoever had originally built this smuggler’s route had armed it with an inspiring (and likely deadly, given the location and how little it was trafficked) array of traps and switchbacks that Edward would, on the whole, prefer to avoid.

Such as, for instance, the rotating pitfall trap just beyond another hidden door, or the sloping tunnel that gradually became steeper and steeper until it dumped you in an ancient cesspit, or the walls that slammed down on all sides if you didn’t stand on a certain brick for thirty seconds, and then only retracted if you pushed certain bricks in sequence to the piano fingering of Camptown Ladies. Ed had expended a _lot_ of increasingly sophisticated RC robots on these tunnels. It had been an education.

The path ultimately came to a dead end below what had once been the Black Dog Jazz Club and was now a chic, slightly-louche bar of the same name, enjoyed legally (and ironically) by Gothamites in search of that retro-debonair jazz-age flavour. It was belied by a jumbled row of wheeled skiffs, now empty and long-defunct. Edward stopped about ten meters prior, marking his location via a crescent-shaped chip near the base of the northward wall. This part had required a _very_ fine ultrasound scan the first time Edward had come upon it. From a roll of dark velvet he pulled one long, irregular piece of metal from among a dozen others and inserted it into a slot in the corner between wall and ceiling, then rotated it a half-circle downward and widdershins — and a camouflaged wooden trapdoor dropped down before him.

The key to entry was, indeed, a key. You see?

He couldn’t help it. Edward beamed with pride as he pulled himself up to the floor of the crawlspace above to lean down and offer a hand up to his pursuant plus-one. Scorning the outstretched hand, the kid leapt the short distance to grasp the edge of the opening in both hands and swung up into an impeccable front somersault, landing neatly beside him.

Edward drew in and blew out a summary breath, then awarded the kid a reluctant nod of approval.

He pulled up the trapdoor to lock it back into place, then removed the plastic covers over his shoes and stored them away neatly the same way he’d done with his gloves. _Shoes off,_ he signed.

Slowly, making sure Edward could see, the kid shook their head.

Ed took the time to let out a much longer sigh. He pulled a clean handkerchief from his pocket and held it out. 

His adolescent accomplice accepted this expiatory offering, thankfully, and applied it with both speed and vigor. It did not escape Ed’s notice that a second cloth appeared in the kid’s hand when the first one proved insufficient, but they at least had the grace to vanish it back to wherever it came from before returning Ed’s own.

(Edward hoped the kid kept it separate from the rest of their things, because _ew.)_

Ed proceeded a few meters farther along the narrow crawlspace to push open an unassuming patch of wall, which opened into a dark closet. He crawled out from beneath the narrow folding cot and stood, hand landing on the doorknob immediately in front of him with the ease of ancient muscle memory.

A quick application of a set of picks, and the door opened into what had once been a book-repair workshop. The space was cramped, not because it was particularly _small_ but because it was filled with worktables strewn with books, blueprints, gadgets, and games — the detritus of an insatiable polymath. Two of the four walls were taken up by shelves containing same, though more organised, as well as half a wall of disguises above a long counter covered in forensic equipment. The fourth wall was a grid of computer and television screens of all different sizes — CRT, LCD, technicolor and monochrome, arranged in a perfect rectangle with no empty space between them. The most difficult part of that feat had been getting ahold of the right screens to refurbish. Edward was a spatial thinker.

Home. One of many, though now reduced due to a certain invasive species of crime lord.

_In order to keep me, you must lose me. What am I? (Teeth.)_

“Well,” Edward announced, holding the door open for his guest, “mi closet es su casa.” He slid a concealed deadbolt shut on the door beneath the cot, then followed his extempore associate inside to flick on a light and hang up his hat and jacket at the end of the clothing rack beside the forensics counter, where they wouldn’t touch anything else. When Ed looked around again, it was to see the kid standing in front of the wall of screens, inspecting his setup thoughtfully.

“Don’t — don’t touch that,” Ed said, throat suddenly tight. “Please,” he added.

The kid took a conspicuous step away, holding their hands up, though Ed noticed they were still looking at the screens. “Do you have a spare mask I can borrow.”

It was the first time he’d heard their voice, and the effect was…unsettling. It was the type of prepubescent soprano he’d expected, but the kid spoke in a flat near-whisper, with a rasp that Ed suspected signified long disuse. He’d barely heard a Talon speak before now — it turned out that when one bothered with full sentences, they sounded like a miniature Owlman.

The implications of that were…well. _Deeply_ unsettling.

“Of course. At least one should fit you.” Edward gestured toward the disguises. “What colour?”

A breath of a pause before they spoke again. “Preferably black or grey. If you have one.”

Ed ran his finger along a shelf of masks sorted by colour and shape until he found a black leather masquerade mask that tied with ribbon rather than relying on adhesive. (Best not to inflict spirit gum on a guest after midnight.) He tossed it to the kid, who snatched it out of the air and turned away to put it on in a single fluid motion.

“Thank you,” they said, turning to face Ed fully for the first time since the two of them had entered his sanctum. Reading people was not where Ed’s expertise lay, but he’d trained himself to recognise signs of stress and interest at the very least — it was a poor prestidigitator who couldn’t even identify the emotional state of their audience — and he thought the kid looked more relaxed now that their face was once again covered, as if Ed would have recognised one random child among four million in any case. (Though — hm. He should run a facial-recognition check through the Gotham PD’s missing-persons database later, though he suspected the Owl would be more thorough than to leave behind evidence of his misdeeds. In more reasonable lighting, the kid was less pale than Ed had originally thought, with a lopsided look it took him a moment to realise was the distinctive result of heterochromia. Métis or Mediterranean, perhaps. Ed doubted the Owl allowed his adolescent assassins much sun.) “I owe you for this.”

“You really don’t,” Edward replied uncomfortably.

“Trust me,” the child said, with an unnervingly adult assurance, “you’ll want that leverage before this is over.”

Ed slumped into the computer chair, letting it spin freely. “How unethical is it to hold a life debt over a child’s head? Let me count the ways!” He stopped, facing his young guest. “Bathroom’s out the secret door and up the ladder to the ventilation system, I’ve had the security system in this part of the building on a loop for years, _please_ be careful about going around dressed like that—” he gestured — “during library hours. And don’t touch anything with wires, switches, buttons, et cetera, and so on and so forth.” Edward hesitated. “What should I call you?” Using a name that would have been imposed on them seemed, well…unlikely to be helpful, for one thing. Potentially retraumatising, for another.

Again that fraction of a pause. “Nyctea is fine.”

 _“Nyctea powhatan,_ the eastern great horned owl,” Ed muttered to himself. The Owl’s favourite species, no less for the implication of chieftainship on top of the standard demonym. Had he decided to resurrect the Court’s ancient tradition of taking on owl monikers after the glaring surcease of his last two micro-minions, or was this another sign of agency? If the latter, what did such a choice signify?

Uncomfortabler and uncomfortabler.

Edward looked up again. The kid didn’t seem surprised at his behaviour. “He, she, xe, or they?”

“He. This is Gold Street, isn’t it?”

“Excellent deduction!” Ed sat up straight and clasped his hands together in front of him, stopping himself from clapping only at the last second, in case it startled the poor boy. “Was it the library that gave it away?”

“In part,” Nyctea replied absently. He was examining the monitor wall again. “We need to figure out what exactly Owlman’s gotten ahold of and what it does. Do any of your associates specialise in medieval Aztec ritual magic?”

“Well, Jaguar’s Mayan, but—” Ed stopped himself, and shooed the kid away from the monitors before tossing him a steel puzzle decahedron that had been lying, solved, on the console. “Here. Try it.”

Nyctea gave him a look of disgust and set the decahedron fastidiously on the nearest worktable before stalking off to inspect the bookshelves on the other side of the room.

Well. At least he knew how to observe computer security etiquette.

Edward cracked his knuckles thoroughly, then proceeded through three layers of passwords and one honeypot screen to his own custom graphical interface, which he had ensured by dint of designing it to his personal workflow would be absolutely incomprehensible to anyone else. He switched on the monitors first. Each showed a different news channel, local and global, all on closed captioning. Ed found the flickering influx of information surrounding him soothing; anything that caught his notice out of the corner of his eye might be meaningful, and in the meantime he’d programmed a natural-language parser to alert him 24/7 to hints of Crime Syndicate activity from any of the online or audiovisual news outlets he tracked. That done, he set up a search for any recent stories related to Aztec archaeology and then began typing up a message to Jaguar, describing everything he’d seen.

“Hey, Nyctea.” When Ed swiveled around, the kid was standing with his back to the bookshelf across the room, flipping through the index of Canul and Gomez’s _Encyclopedia of Central American Mythology._ “Answer me this: what do you know about the shipment the Owl was receiving at the docks tonight? Anything might be useful.”

Nyctea set the book down on a nearby worktable. “Owlman,” he said quietly.

Edward raised an eyebrow. “Yes, whatever. That’s hardly relevant.”

The intensity of the boy’s stare pinned Ed to the wall like a butterfly. “I’d think you of all people would recognise the importance of names, _Mr. E. Nigma.”_

“All right,” Edward said after a long moment, spinning his chair around sulkily. “You’ve made your point. I’d like to get this handled as soon as possible, if you please. Every second might make a difference.”

“The shipment was of artifacts taken from a recently uncovered temple at Istaktepetl in la Sierra Madre de Oaxaca, which had been buried in a volcanic eruption about 950 years ago. Whichever deity or deities were worshiped there, we have no extant history of the place other than a few stories that it was cursed for heresy, and the iconography was unfamiliar — of a two-headed or dual deity, both male and female. Hence the presence of an expert.” There was a certain undefinable irony in Nyctea’s voice at that. “The altar stone you were holding at the time of the explosion was inlaid with turquoise and jasper, and the calendar symbols around the circumference were double-layered, with the inner circle laid out in reverse…”

Ed stopped typing as Nyctea trailed off. “What?”

“Blood sacrifice,” the boy murmured, as if to himself.

“A- _ha!”_ Ed slapped the console and stood, then took an immediate step back and held his hands up as Nyctea’s hand went to his belt. “Sorry. But that explains everything, don’t you see? Aztec culture glorifies blood sacrifice, the symbolic exchange of sacred life-force for divine intercession. If someone were to engage in religious ritual without first undergoing the proper purification rites, of _course_ it would go wrong!”

“Of course,” the kid repeated with a small, secretive smile that passed over his face like a cloudshadow over the moon, gone almost as soon as it appeared. “You were both holding the altar stone when it happened.”

“And with opposite motives,” Edward finished. “No wonder it reacted the way it did.” He sat down emphatically to note down everything in a rush. “Anything else you can think of?”

“The bodies inside the temple were left undisturbed,” Nyctea replied. “Owlman isn’t stupid. But I can’t say what happened to the original archaeological team that uncovered the temple.”

Something in the kid’s phrasing gave Ed pause. “Can’t? Or won’t?”

“Can’t.” Nyctea fixed Edward with an even gaze. “Don’t worry.”

“As _if,”_ Ed muttered. “I can’t believe he thought stealing cursed religious artifacts was in any way a good idea.”

“Who can fathom the mind of a master criminal?” This time the shadow of a smile lasted a moment longer. The boy either had a very weird sense of humour or a very weird way of coping. It was probably impossible to keep from developing at least one of the two if one were forced to spend much time in the Owl’s — in _Owlman’s_ presence. (Ugh.) 

“Well, I _intend_ to, at least. Anything else?” asked Ed.

“If Owlman figures out how to use that artifact, the fate of the world might be at stake.”

Edward stared. “You couldn’t _lead_ with that?”

“It’ll take some time, at the very least,” Nyctea responded without chagrin. “He doesn’t know any more than we do. Regardless, it’s vital that we retrieve that altar stone and ideally the rest of the artifacts as soon as possible. I can’t provide any useful information about the others, other than an inventory.”

Ed added this _last little detail_ to the top of his message, then spent another endless few minutes prying any other potentially pertinent details on the remaining artifacts out of Nyctea’s stony grip. Finally he added Klarion and the other magi in his circle to the list of recipients, just in case, and hit send with a conclusive flourish that spun his chair around once before he stopped it. He opened up a CAD program to follow up with what little he could remember of the altar stone’s appearance. Edward didn’t _quite_ have a photographic memory — the common conception of such didn't actually exist, according to peer-reviewed studies — but his visual processing was acute enough to fool most people into thinking otherwise. Five minutes later, he asked, “Can you think of anything to add?”

Nyctea looked up from his perusal of the Encyclopedia of Central American Mythology. “No,” he said after a moment of examination. Ed thought he heard a note of surprise in the kid’s voice. He hoped so. “That’s very good.”

“Thank you,” Edward replied, pleased. He sent the sketch on the heels of the last message, let his local vigilantes know that he was intact — _housing little lost bird,_ his message added — then logged out and stood up to start unloading the pockets of his sullied jacket, transferring his PDA to his pants pocket in the process. “I’m going to go clean up. Will you be all right here?”

Nyctea nodded, ignoring the multiple other seats in the room to settle in Ed’s chair like a nest-thieving house sparrow with the hefty volume in his lap. Ed felt the kid’s eyes on his back all the way out the secret door. 

His PDA buzzed against his leg with two near-simultaneous responses. _Beware cuckoos,_ said the Jester’s, followed by exactly the same sentiment moments later from Wild Rose. Ed frowned, hanging off the ladder below the ventilation shaft. He was _well aware,_ thank you very much. That was why he’d opted to hide the kid in one of his oldest and most secure safehouses. 

He sent a reply to this effect, then squeezed through the air intake vent to drop into the Gold Street Public Library’s south basement bathroom. Even this was rarely used by anyone other than the staff, though not forgotten completely like the old book-repair workshop now blocked off by decades of irreparable and irreplaceable volumes in serried rows of ancient shelves and abandoned book carts. Ed surveyed his jacket with dismay. It would benefit most from a thorough dry-cleaning, but he’d rather not leave his unanticipated foundling alone for as long as it took to break into and take advantage of the relevant establishment three blocks over. He’d have to do what he could by setting it in for a long soak, and hope for the best. At least his gloves were a fine-woven kevlar blend and therefore easily cleaned.

Ed stopped, mind catching up to an incongruity his brain had latched onto in his periphery.

He inspected his face more closely in the mirror over the sink. No doubt about it: there was no bruise on his cheek where he’d been hit. He pressed on the spot gently, cautiously, but there was no electric spike of pain. He probed the inside of his cheek with his tongue — still raw where his teeth had cut it.

_What?_

Ed undid the top two buttons of his shirt and winced at the marks on his neck, sharp-edged and red-black under the faded yellow light of elderly incandescent bulbs. It took a lot for bruises to show up on skin as dark as his, but his cheek should still _hurt._ He’d been beaten up enough in his life to know what the aftermath felt like.

But no visible bullet graze when he turned his head. No mark on his inner arm, either, though the skin was thicker there. With the force of that blow to the radial nerve, his forearm should still be tingling from wrist to elbow even half an hour later. It felt…fine. Strangely fine.

And his ears weren’t even ringing, other than the ever-present faint tinnitus tone of the lights overhead. Edward rubbed one earlobe thoughtfully.

_Riddle me this: what is both poison and the cure?_

Magic. It had to be — a stroke of good fortune in exchange for the lifeblood he’d sacrificed. But why heal only some of his injuries? Or, more importantly, _how?_

Ed returned to the workshop buttoned-up and troubled. “What is it?” said Nyctea as soon as he came through the door.

Edward waved the issue away. “Nothing important.”

Nyctea raised an eloquent eyebrow.

“It’s really nothing,” Ed insisted. “Just…trying to figure out magical mechanics with no data or means to test my hypotheses, as you do.”

Nyctea leaned forward, closing the book with one finger marking his place. “Go on.”

Ed pursed his lips, but what were his other options, really? Klarion and the rest had more important things to think about right now, and anything he said might jog loose even one more critical memory. He started to pace around the room, counting off bullet points on his fingers. “Fact: in my battle with the — with Owlman, I incurred five injuries: a bullet graze at the back of my scalp, blows to the face and radial nerve, a cut on the inside of my cheek, and acute pressure to the throat. Fact: of those injuries, only two had the expected effect. Fact: by all appearances, I underwent neither the bullet graze nor the blows to the face and arm, yet my cheek still bears the aftermath. Fact: there is no medical explanation for this. The only logical conclusion is that it was an effect of the altar stone, but I can’t figure out _why.”_

Nyctea was silent for a moment; then he asked, “How willing were you to endure those injuries?”

 _“Excuse_ m— I don’t go around _trying_ to get the stuffing knocked out of me!”

“That’s not what I meant,” said the boy patiently. “Aztec rituals require willing sacrifice. The reason the cut wasn’t healed is obvious. How many other injuries did you accept?”

Ed’s hand went to his throat automatically. “I…was willing to sacrifice my life, clearly.”

“But your face? Your mind?”

Edward hesitated before answering, which was all that needed to be said. “Are you saying that I was healed because of _vanity?”_

Nyctea shrugged and returned to his reading.

Ed sat in a nearby chair, watching the wall of newscasts without really seeing them. His hands sought out the now-pristine half-dollar without his conscious intervention, rolling it across his knuckles—

The coin landed on the floor again.

_Why._

Ed picked it up under the penetrating scrutiny of Nyctea, who had looked up sharply at the sound. When he surreptitiously held out the offending hand, it was shaking very slightly. Adrenaline exhaustion. Ed walked the coin across his knuckles more slowly this time, watching the motions, picking up speed gradually as he confirmed his ability — and this time he saw it when the coin slipped between the middle and ring fingers of his right hand, and caught it in his left before it landed.

He stared at his hands, brain buzzing with a miserable static. Post-stress comedown from a near-death experience, fine, that was understandable, but he could at least have one of his _coping methods_ while he was dealing with it. Ed picked up the decahedron Nyctea had set down earlier and went through the motions of randomising it, working it out by touch without looking down.

His right hand, the one that had suffered the blow to the radial nerve, had been the culprit every time. Evidently he wasn’t _quite_ as narcissistic as all that.

Small comforts.

“We should sleep in shifts,” Edward said eventually. “Keep an eye on the news, in case something important comes up.”

“You may, if you want to.” Nyctea didn’t look up from his reading.

“You’re like ten years old,” Ed pointed out. “You’ll stunt your growth.”

A mirthless smile. “Trust me — that’s the least of my concerns.”

“I’m sorry,” Edward said worthlessly after a moment.

“Don’t be,” Nyctea replied, deadpan. _“Please.”_

Ed lapsed into awkward silence, setting down the completed decahedron to pick up a ring puzzle on the table nearby. According to his PDA, the only results of his search were news articles containing what little they already knew, other than the (suspected, according to the articles) smuggler captain’s title — Tokotsi, the Wildcat. The archaeological team presiding over the excavation was still missing. Ed set his program to trawl academic databases for anything related to a dual Aztec god or a heretical temple buried under a volcanic eruption in the Sierra Madre mountains.

“You know,” said Nyctea, “you can ask for your chair back.”

“I…” Edward trailed off, tongue-tied.

With great dignity, the boy stood and moved to a stool next to the forensics counter.

“Thank you,” said Edward, slipping gratefully back into his chair.

Nyctea gave him a skeptical look. “I can’t believe you’re this much of a pushover out of the public eye.”

“I’m not—” Just then his PDA buzzed, and Ed brought up the results on the main computer screen. “Ometeotl!”

Nyctea materialised behind Ed’s shoulder, making his heart rate spike momentarily. “There’s almost nothing here.”

“Yes.” Ed clicked through to the source articles, sending a prayer of thanks to the ghost of Ruth D. Barzilai as usual for the Global Interlibrary Subscription Service. “No surviving temples, no surviving written accounts — all we seem to have are a few basic oral tales. Not even personal prayers.” He recognised one of the researchers’ names, for some reason; after a moment of struggle, he recalled that Jaguar had mentioned it once. She _would_ take an interest in the lost religious artifacts of nearby cultures, Ed supposed. She had a personal stake in the subject. “Apparently Ometeotl comprises both Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl, though this doesn’t say whether they’re epithets or—”

“I can read.”

Ed snapped his mouth shut, face burning. “Sorry.” A dual-gendered celestial creation deity/ies, presiding over the sky and weather, and beyond that…almost nothing. Not even a description of their religious practices. The medieval Aztecs must have purged every sign of Ometeotl’s worship they could find.

“At least the iconography makes sense now,” he offered.

Nyctea nodded. “I could only find one sentence about them in the Encyclopedia of Central American Mythology, and that was just a mention of their name in the chapter on creation myths.”

“At least I suppose we can take solace in the fact that Owlman doesn’t know any better than us how to use the thing,” Ed remarked wanly.

“Regardless, the thought of it remaining in his hands, or Phantasma’s, isn’t cause for comfort.” Nyctea took a single step back out of Ed’s personal space. “You should rest first. I’m used to late nights. I’ll wake you if anything significant comes up.”

“I’m fine,” replied Edward delicately. “Much as I appreciate the offer.”

“You can say you don’t trust me,” Nyctea pointed out with a humourless smirk.

Ed turned his chair to face the boy. “Trust, but verify. I’m more use awake right now, anyway.”

“Then I suppose neither of us is sleeping tonight.” Nyctea vaulted effortlessly to the top of the table behind him and settled into a comfortable crouch. Ed tried to disguise his expression at the contact between his workspace and the unsanitary bottoms of the kid’s boots. That had _not_ been part of their bargain. Nyctea seemed not to notice. “I’ll keep an eye on the news. Do whatever you feel is necessary.”

“Then we’re agreed,” retorted Edward, turning back to the computer to start trawling the local dark web networks for up-to-the-moment gossip.

* * *

Owlman —

No.

It had been surprisingly easy to adopt his old name again, like putting on a well-worn cloak. Nigma was naive, and too good for his own well-being — or everyone else’s, for that matter; the possibility of duplicity seemed to occur to him only as an afterthought — but he was anything but stupid. He simply was not in possession of all the necessary facts.

The truth would not have occurred to Nyctea, either. Without context, it simply didn’t make sense.

Ometeotl. A dual deity.

His other half had tried to kill him.

“Stop,” snapped Nyctea as a coin landed on the console for the eighth time in the past half hour.

“Sorry,” said Nigma, seeming genuinely apologetic under his veneer of largesse, the eternal conciliatory pomposity of a man apparently running for mayor of nothing.

“Don’t apologise. Do something you’re _capable_ of.”

Nigma pouted. At least he was a handsome enough man that it gave his face a Byronic cast rather than merely making him look petulant. “I _should_ be capable of this. I usually am.”

“Then I suggest you stop thinking about it. And do something _else.”_

Nigma set the coin on the console out of immediate reach and picked up a mirror cube with ill humour, spinning in his chair as he shuffled and solved it seemingly unconsciously. It was, if possible, even more annoying than the intermittent ringing of metal.

Nyctea let out a silent sigh and looked past the man at the news monitors above him. As hills to die on went, squabbling over petty aggravations with the erstwhile enemy his life depended on was one of the more asinine ones.

It took at least an hour, but eventually the sounds of the man’s relentless fidgeting slowed and, ultimately, quieted. Nyctea crept up alongside him, noting the way Nigma slumped in his chair, head drooping, one leg curled up underneath him. He would wake up numb and stumbling. All so avoidably senseless.

Nyctea had promised nothing. He’d been polite enough not to peek when Nigma logged into his system — much as he would have preferred to, an implicit agreement had been established, and Nyctea was not so free with his word as to disregard it whenever it became inconvenient — but anything he did while Nigma was asleep, the dolt had brought on himself. Nyctea squeezed between the chair and keyboard and began to explore.

It was a fascinating challenge. Under normal circumstances, he would have enjoyed spending hours peeling apart the layers of Cypher’s operating system like an onion. As it was, he made it ten minutes before some obscure conditional resulted in a “GAME OVER ☹” screen from which Nyctea could not escape without opening up the CPU. He silently moved away, leaving the screen for Nigma to assume he’d accidentally activated in his sleep.

Another hour of scouting the surrounding building and streets later, the silver glow of predawn was just beginning to emerge over the tops of Gotham’s skyscrapers as Nyctea slipped back inside the hideout to his perch. His eyes unfocused slightly to take in Nigma’s monstrous amalgamation of data input, adopting the standard scanning pattern he used while on watch or searching for a camouflaged target, alighting on each screen just long enough to confirm the presence or absence of pertinent visual content.

_…hacked all but two of Gotham’s major branch banks to transfer exactly $65,536 from each to an unknown Swiss bank account, in what Northern Bank’s public liaison Chandra Singh is calling “an inexplicable sum”. The hacker left no other identifying signs—_

Years of unraveling Cypher’s stupid riddles would have been sufficient even if Nyctea hadn’t been programming for long enough that the number keyed an immediate sense of recognition. 16-bit integer overflow — the point at which a numeric value exceeded a processor’s memory and wrapped back around to zero. As such puzzles went, it was almost refreshingly straightforward.

Which meant it was a _message._

Two strides took him to the man’s side and Nyctea gripped his shoulder with an intensity that would have bruised if he’d had his usual size and strength. “Nigma.”

His host jolted awake, eyes widening with momentary panic before he recognised Nyctea and his expression settled into a more quotidian anxiety. “Ye gods! Don’t call me that. If you _must_ get personal, at least use Ed—”

“Who else would steal $65,536 from all but two of Gotham’s major banks, and transfer it to an anonymous Swiss bank account?” Nyctea interrupted.

The sequence of bewilderment, guilt, and indignance that passed over Nigma’s face was plain as day. “I…don’t know. You were with me all last night — I never had the opportunity.”

Too off-balance to even attempt a _plausible_ lie. Nyctea didn’t bother saying anything, just tilted his head and tightened his grip the slightest amount, letting the weight of his judgement pressure the man into confessing.

“All right, fine, I could have done it anytime in the past — well. Decade, really,” Nigma admitted, looking between Nyctea and the GAME OVER screen with confusion. “But I _didn’t._ I _wouldn’t.”_

“Wouldn’t?” Nyctea probed silkily.

“No!” The man actually looked upset. “I’ve thought about it, _obviously,_ but I’ve never even _mentioned_ it to any—” He slapped the arms of the chair and stood abruptly, tearing free of Nyctea’s grasp. “I’m left-handed!”

“So is eighty-five percent of the population,” Nyctea pointed out tartly to cover his bemusement. Cypher had always used both in their engagements, to an obsessive and occasionally self-sabotaging degree.

“No, you see, I’m ambisinister—” He reached across the console for the half-dollar lying there and spun it over the knuckles of his left hand in a shimmering silver arc before flicking it to his right hand, fumbling it, and catching it with his left again. “Except now I’m not. You were on to something: I _knew_ that I could never fight th— Owlman on equal ground and come out completely intact, and as for what parts of myself I was willing to sacrifice…well, who wouldn’t rid themselves of their worst impulses if they had the chance?” Nigma began to pace in feverish agitation, gesticulating grandly. “What do you get when nothing goes right? Whatever’s left! No one else could have known my exact plan unless they were a telepath — Owlman is just a charlatan with a bag full of tricks, and he’d never attack his own money-laundering mills in any case. This _must_ have been Ometeotl’s doing. A dual deity, fulfilling a blood sacrifice in the face of conflicting motives!” He sat down just as suddenly, staring at his right hand in disgust. “They couldn’t have chosen less stereotypical symbolism?”

“Implicit bias,” murmured Nyctea, following his host’s leaps of logic all too easily. He’d never quite managed to achieve that level of perfect balance, but his greater half had favoured his right— “What?” he asked as Nigma’s gaze suddenly went distant.

Nigma turned to him, ashen. “The 65 thousand-dollar question: If my shadow, or whatever force we’re referring to as such for the sake of convenience, was willing to commit grand larceny — how far could this go?"

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever thought of?” Nyctea inquired half-rhetorically. “The last thing you’d ever do, that you’re disgusted to even have contemplated?”

“Oh,” Nigma whispered, gnawing at his thumbnail. Then, aloud, “Oh, that’s _not_ good.”

“Don’t worry,” said Nyctea with a humorless scalpel of a smile, small and razor-sharp. “It gets much worse.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The terminology regarding grenades and related tactical devices is a lot less precise or consistent than one might expect, so to clear up any potential ambiguity: as used in this fic, a flashbang is a light-and-sound explosive designed to momentarily blind and disorient anyone exposed to it without causing injury; a concussion grenade is a nonlethal explosive that generates a shockwave strong enough to disrupt the human vestibular system and temporarily stun anyone within an approximately three-meter blast radius, though this carries an associated risk of longer-term or more severe damage. As a hero with major ethical compunctions against causing unnecessary harm or death, Edward usually avoids using concussion grenades unless he’s out of other options due to their potential for unintended injury.
> 
> The [grammar of American Sign Language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ojibwe_writing_systems#Romanized_Ojibwe_systems) differs from spoken English due in part to limits on information density (the number and complexity of concepts that can be communicated through available information channels within a certain amount of time, i.e. how efficiently meaning can be conveyed) and the specific possibilities and constraints of gesture-based communication. Facial expressions and body language are frequently used in combination with hand signs to clarify tone and punctuation. The ASL dialogue in this fic is translated into conventional English syntax for ease of understanding — since, as my friends keep helpfully reminding me, not everyone I meet is multilingual or wants to spend their fic-reading time parsing out sentence structure for fun, especially if they’re already fluent — but in reality only about half those words would be articulated.
> 
> American geopolitics in this universe would require an essay in itself, but suffice it to say there’s some geographic overlap with Ojibwa Sign Language in Gotham and the surrounding Great Lakes area, though the languages themselves are separate — since English is a European language used as a lingua franca in the eastern half of North America, and the Anishinaabe Nation (and the dialects used by its members and those who regularly interact with them) only partly overlaps with that area, there is a lot of local creolisation that doesn’t extend to wider usage in either language outside of those locales. (Again, because most of my readers wouldn’t be prepared to parse multiple unfamiliar languages and I myself am not conversant enough in Ojibwe not to inevitably mess up, the dialogue in this series does not reflect the degree of cross-language blending that I imagine would occur except in cases where culturally-specific terms or concepts are relevant.)
> 
> Killer Croc is one of the few characters in the mirror universe who doesn’t get a name change along with the alignment-swap, since “Killer Croc” was originally a stage name in a carnival sideshow and continues to be a _very_ effective intimidation tactic against Gotham’s underworld. Croc is, however, a trans woman in this verse, because I am a god here and therefore I can do what I want. (Especially if it makes the gender ratio less ridiculous.) Wild Rose is the mirror counterpart of Poison Ivy, and is named in part due to the influence of [Kieron_oDuibhir](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir) and in part based on Poison Ivy's debut episode in Batman: The Animated Series.
> 
> Feedback and constructive criticism inspire me to write more — even if I don’t always respond, I read and treasure every comment. If you’ve enjoyed this fic so far and want to see more, consider checking out [my other work in this universe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gray_Days/works?fandom_id=390) as well!


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